Louveciennes, Route de Saint-Germain

1871

Medium

Watercolor over black chalk

Dimensions

30.2 × 49.2 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-202660

As much as a specific location, this large watercolor represents a particular season. The palette of muted browns, blacks, greens, and blues create an autumnal landscape. The pale blue-gray sky, streaked with clouds, and the sparse foliage, both on and fallen from the almost bare trees, also convey winter's approach. A single figure and, in the distance, a figure and carriage, move along the desolate road curving through the scene. Camille Pissarro's landscape shows the road to the town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye from Louveciennes, a village west of Paris. Many of Pissarro's landscapes of the early 1870s show the roads into and out of Louveciennes. Pissarro himself lived intermittently in Louveciennes and was part of a close-knit community of landscape painters who lived or traveled there including Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. During the early 1870s, Pissarro began experimenting with the emerging Impressionist painting style by returning to watercolor, a medium he had used as a student during the 1850s. Using black chalk, Pissarro first indicated the main features of the composition. He then fleshed out the scene by covering almost the entire…